Technology The solar eclipse is a rare opportunity to study the sun. Scientists are psyched.

Amazon is refunding customer purchases for protective solar eclipse glasses that it hasn’t been able to confirm come from a reputable manufacturer, according to a safety notification from the company. Excitement has been building for the upcoming solar eclipse across the United States on August 21st, and would-be eclipse viewers have purchased protective glasses from retailers such as Amazon.com. However, not all of the glasses found on the site are safe to use, with some vendors selling counterfeit or unsafe versions. Amazon appears to have been cracking down on these suspect glasses.

The solar eclipse may help scientists solve mysteries of the sun ’s atmosphere. Total solar eclipse passes over US. The solar eclipse is a rare opportunity to study the sun . Scientists are psyched .

So the solar eclipse is an unusual opportunity to study Mercury with minimal interference from the sun . And one team of astronomers is seizing that opportunity in a very dramatic way. The solar eclipse will give scientists a huge opportunity .

The solar eclipse may help scientists solve mysteries of the sun’s atmosphere.

A total solar eclipse is a rare occasion to marvel at nature, contemplate life, and think about the cosmos. But the total solar eclipse on August 21 will also be an important moment to gather scientific data about the sun as the moon covers it completely for an hour-and-a-half journey across the United States.

To this day, many aspects of the sun remain a mystery: What causes solar flares, when massive amounts of energy and plasma are ejected from the sun? Why is the corona, the solar atmosphere, actually hotter than the surface?

What time is the solar eclipse where I live?

You'll need perfect timing to catch the exact moment the moon blocks the sun in your city. The total solar eclipse on Aug. 21 lasts less than a minute in some places, while a partial eclipse can be visible for an hour or more.

Next week's total solar eclipse will give NASA a rare peak at the Sun 's atmosphere. To study the corona when there's no eclipse , space scientists usually make use of a coronagraph, which creates artificial eclipses by using an opaque disk to block the Sun 's face.

Monday’s total solar eclipse will give scientists a rare opportunity to study the lower regions of the sun ’s corona. Here’s what NASA scientists will be investigating.

The eclipse provides a natural experiment to test some of these questions. The moon is perfectly sized to block out the entire surface of the sun, leaving the corona, which is some million times fainter in our view.

“Even with our best instruments today we cannot recreate those observations,” Ryan Milligan, a solar physicist who works with NASA, says. The space agency has a spacecraft called the Solar Dynamic Observatory that can — with a disc — mimic an eclipse to study the sun, but the moon provides a deeper view. With the moon, “we can see the corona almost all the way down to the surface,” Milligan says.

It’s essential for us understand the sun. For one, knowing more about our own star helps us understand all the other stars in the universe just a bit better. But we also need to understand the sun because of the dangers it poses to our civilization. One solar storm pointed toward Earth could take out or disrupt much of our communication infrastructure.

Drones will fly into the path of the eclipse to study weather

As the sky does dark, robots will conduct atmospheric science. &nbsp;This flight is part of the broader “Collaboration Leading Operational Unmanned Development for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics” (CLOUD MAP) project, where four universities are trying to figure out how to use drones to better study weather. Drones are ideal because they can fly above towers and below where manned aircraft and balloons operate. It’s this lower atmospheric boundary layer that the drones are built to study.

The total solar eclipse provides a rare opportunity for scientists to study the Sun , particularly its atmosphere. (Photo illustration) During the upcoming total solar eclipse , a team of NASA-funded scientists will observe the solar corona using stabilized telescopes aboard two of NASA’s

He claims the goal is to study the outermost layers of the sun ’s atmosphere, called the corona. “Any solar eclipse is a good opportunity to study the ionosphere,” said Jill K. Nelson, who is an expert in signal processing at George Mason University in Virginia.

During this coming solar eclipse, there will be several experiments to make the most of this rare moment. One involves NASA sending up two WB-57F jets to trace the path of totality and capture the corona with specially mounted telescopes. The hope is to create a time-lapse video of the activity in the corona.

“These could well turn out to be the best-ever observations of high frequency phenomena in the corona,” Dan Seaton, a University of Colorado solar physicist leading the project, said in a press statement. Specifically, the planes will be searching for “nano flares” — relatively small pulses of energy that are hard to spot but might explain the superheating of the corona.

Other efforts will be ground-based. One NASA-funded experiment, called Citizen Cate, will link 68 telescopes (manned by high schools and universities) across the path of totality in the hope of creating a 90-minute video of the corona.

If you're watching the total solar eclipse, don't forget to wear sunscreen

Be sure to wear sunscreen — especially if you're planning to view it for a long time.&nbsp;While you might be more concerned with keeping your eyes safe from the sun, the hour or two you spend watching the whole process will leave your skin exposed.

The total solar eclipse provides a rare opportunity for scientists to study the Sun , particularly its atmosphere. As the Moon completely covers the Sun and perfectly blocks its light during an eclipse , the typically faint corona is easily seen against the dark sky.

“The August 21 solar eclipse gives us a rare opportunity to study the stratosphere when it’s even more Mars-like than usual,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Scientists discover 13 million year old fossil skull of an infant ape.

“Some of these cameras [attached to the telescopes] can take 100 frames per second, and from that, you could actually see waves propagating from coronal structures,” Milligan says. And charting those waves, again, could give clues to how energy is transferred from the surface of the sun to the corona. Another, separate project will launch dozens of balloons equipped with cameras and sensors in the path of totality to capture the event above the threat of clouds.

In the past, eclipses have yielded fascinating scientific insights

If these efforts are successful, they’ll join the canon of scientific knowledge gained during eclipses.

For instance, helium — the second most abundant element the entire universe — was discovered during a solar eclipse.

In 1868, a total eclipse was passing over southern India, and scientists had what was cutting-edge technology at the time: a spectroscope. The spectroscope is basically a prism — a device to separate light into its different wavelength components. When you point a spectroscope at burning gases, you can determine which element is burning in the flames by looking at the pattern of light that comes out of the prism.

Nick Saban does not have time to care about your solar eclipse

He plans to watch it on television.But Nick Saban is not going to let the upcoming solar eclipse take away from his focus on the only thing that matters: Alabama football.

2. The eclipse offers a rare glimpse of the sun ’s secret majesty. The light show that occurs during a total solar eclipse is unlike any other natural phenomena, which is why scientists flock to and study the event in droves.

The US total solar eclipse of August 2017 will provide scientists with valuable information about the sun 's activity and its effects on Earth's atmosphere. The eclipse will also be an opportunity to study the ionosphere, a layer of the Earth's atmosphere.

The sun is, essentially, a ball of burning gases. In 1868, astronomer Pierre Janssen used a spectroscope to analyze the composition of the sun’s atmosphere during a total eclipse, and he found a strange spectral pattern. Further analysis revealed the element burning in the corona was like nothing else on record. The element was named “helium” (for helios, the Greek word for “sun.”) “Helium is the only element that was ever discovered somewhere else rather than on Earth first,” Steve Ruskin, an astronomer and science historian, says. And it’s all thanks to the solar eclipse.

One of the most famous scientific theories of all time was also proven during a solar eclipse: Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The theory, first published in 1915, said that gravity literally warps the space and time surrounding massive objects. The sun, the most massive object in the solar system, in this sense should act like a lens, bending light around it. In 1919, during an eclipse in South America, astronomers took photographs of the stars surrounding the sun during totality. And they found the evidence: Stars that should have appeared near the sun were shifted ever so slightly in the sky, proving spacetime warps around our star.

All this science is possible because of a cosmic coincidence: The apparent size of the moon is the same as the sun in our sky. There’s no scientific reason for this to be the case. We’re just lucky.

And we won’t be lucky forever. The moon is slowly getting farther and farther away from the Earth. It will take a billion years or more, Vox’s Joss Fong reports, but eventually there will be a final total solar eclipse.

By then, we hope, humanity — or whatever comes to replace it — will have finally figured out the secrets of the sun.

Eclipse: Family over the moon with totality baby .
As the moon made its way across the sun during a rare solar eclipse on Monday, Charlotte Roel Easterly said hello to the world. The 7-pound, 11-ounce baby girl was born at Sacred Hospital at 1:36 p.m. CT at the exact moment of the height of the eclipse in Pensacola. "It was literally during the eclipse, it was the most amazing thing," said Karen Lee, the baby's aunt. Even in the busy maternity ward, employees and patient family members took turns going outside with special glasses to view the eclipse, Lee said. "People had been talking about it all day," said Lee. USA TODAY Network: Complete coverage of the solar eclipse Her sister, Taria White, went into labor around 9 a.m. Lee said her sister had joked months earlier that she was going to have the baby during the eclipse, but it was an unexpected surprise when Charlotte was actually born during the height of the rare solar event. The odds were, well, astronomical. It takes three celestial bodies (the sun, moon and Earth) all of which are on various orbital paths, to line up in the exact way at the right time to create an eclipse. The last total solar eclipse visible in the U.S. was on Feb. 26, 1979. Monday's total eclipse was visible in the U.S. only — the first time that's happened since the country's founding in 1776, according to USA TODAY. "It was really special," Lee said.

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